Leases

ORLANDO, Fla. - Does anyone need a 15,000-foot landing strip? How about a place to assemble rocket ships? Or a parachute-packing plant? A launchpad? Make us an offer, says NASA, which is quietly holding a going-out-of-business sale for the facilities used by its space shuttle program. The last shuttle flight was in July 2011, when Atlantis made its final touchdown. That orbiter, like its sisters Discovery and Endeavour, is now a museum piece . As soon as some remaining cleanup is finished at Kennedy Space Center, the shuttle program will be history.

San Diego may lease public property to the Boy Scouts of America at a steeply discounted rate even though the group bans gays and atheists, a federal appeals court ruled Thursday. A three-judge panel of the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, overturning a lower court decision, said San Diego was not engaging in discrimination by leasing valuable property to the youth organization in exchange for the group's commitment to improve and manage the land. The ruling stemmed from a lawsuit filed by two couples, one lesbian, the other agnostic, who said that the city was subsidizing a group with discriminatory policies.

The Children's Museum of Los Angeles, a never-used, $21.8-million white elephant next to Hansen Dam Recreation Center on the city's northern edge, is back on track to become an attraction and an educational asset. After more than two years of discussions with operators of the nonprofit Discovery Science Center in Santa Ana, the City Council has approved putting an additional $18.1 million into the project, which will enable Discovery to equip the San Fernando Valley site with environmental and other science exhibits and open its doors by March 2015.

WASHINGTON --  American International Group announced it is selling a majority stake in its Century City aircraft leasing company to Chinese investors as the insurance giant continued to shed non-essential assets to help pay off its government bailout money. AIG has been trying to sell International Lease Finance Corp. since the 2008 financial crisis. The firm owns or manages more than 1,000 aircraft, which it rents to nearly every major airline worldwide.  The aircraft leasing company's headquarters will remain in Los Angeles, according to AIG and the investor group led by Weng Xianding, chairman of New China Trust Co. They announced the sale late on Sunday.

No one wants to live near a noisy, crowded boarding house whose residents are, at the least, an annoyance and, at the worst, a threat to public health and safety. City nuisance laws and zoning codes are supposed to minimize such problems, but they're not enforced consistently or effectively against bad operators. So L.A. City Councilman Mitchell Englander has been trying to craft an ordinance that would tighten laws on group homes and boarding houses. The L.A. Municipal Code currently defines a "family" as any group of people living in a residence and sharing access to common areas such as kitchens and bathrooms, a definition that offers advantages in a diverse city but makes it difficult to shut down a badly run boarding house.

Insurance giant American International Group Inc. is in talks to sell a 90% stake in its Century City aircraft-leasing company to Chinese investors. AIG revealed in a statement Friday that talks to sell International Lease Finance Corp. were underway. The New York insurance company has been trying to unload the unit since 2008, when AIG nearly collapsed and was forced to go under government control. The leasing company, better known as ILFC, buys aircraft and rents them to airlines for a fixed period.

In the corner of a drab Culver City business park, nestled inside a gray two-story building, treasures from the Cold War lie waiting for the historically curious: Hungarian oil paintings, a full run of East Germany's official party newspaper and a Vladimir Lenin bust, vandalized with pink and turquoise paint to resemble a clown. Outside, 2.6 tons of the Berlin Wall greets those who enter. It's all there, if you can find it. "I think the Wende Museum is one of Culver City's best kept secrets," Councilman Jim Clarke said.

"Twilight" film series actor Christopher Heyerdahl has leased in Venice at $3,200 a month. The one-bedroom, one-bathroom unit has 600 square feet of living space and is furnished. The location is close to the beach, restaurants and shopping Heyerdahl, 49, reprises his role as a vampire leader in "The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn – Part 2," due out Nov. 16. He has been on the series "Hell on Wheels" since last year and this year joined the cast of "True Blood. " Ian Brooks of Prudential's Santa Monica office was the listing agent.

Twenty dollars says you can't tell us in what year this car was made. Actually, scratch that; $100 says you can't name the decade it's from. This is entirely the point of the car you see here, which was shown recently at the Specialty Equipment Market Assn. trade show by a Missouri company called Retrobuilt. What you're looking at is a brand-new Ford Mustang GT, powered by the Coyote 5.0-liter V-8 engine. Sitting on top of the donor car is a fiberglass body kit, designed to replicate the look of a 1969 Mustang Boss 302. To get the look, Retrobuilt fused fiberglass body panels to the existing rear quarter panels and door skins and then replaced the front fenders, hood and rear desk with fiberglass parts.